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View Full Version : How do you or did you start a Linux career



matthekc
May 20th, 2012, 04:57 PM
Hello I'll start by saying a little about where I am in my career now and then I want to ask some questions.

I have 3 years of job experience supporting Windows, 2 as a part time technician working on home PC's and small networks and 1 in a large domain environment. Currently I work at a fairly large multi-national corporation as a Level 1 support specialist and right now I plan on staying here for at least another year. Here are some examples of what I do now I do a lot of client support, I do some AD work (everything but GPO's I have created a few, but only under supervision), some basic Exchange tasks creating groups, mailboxes ect... I also do some work with printers and print servers, A little with the Hyper V management tool, and few other things that I don't do that often.

I have been running Linux on and off again for about 5 years or so. I like it and I would like to work with it more. How do you break into a Linux career... is there a Linux help desk market preferably in heterogeneous environments? If not as I begin to move up in my Windows Networking skills what should I be doing or reading to also become a junior Linux admin.

What projects do I need to do to have a basic skill set. I am assuming at least some of it would be stuff like setting up Samba/Ldap and Apache on some VM servers with some VM clients.

Is the Linux+ or LCPI a requirement if so would the Linux+ cut it or should I go LCPI. Also what reading do you guys recommend?

matthekc
May 20th, 2012, 05:48 PM
Is there a better place to ask this and other questions I will have if I want to start really learning this stuff?

mips
May 20th, 2012, 05:54 PM
Is the Linux+ or LCPI a requirement if so would the Linux+ cut it or should I go LCPI. Also what reading do you guys recommend?

If you want to do certs do Red Hat, it will get you further than any other linux cert. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_hat_certification

My answer is based on what the industry asks for and recognises as the best.

matthekc
May 20th, 2012, 06:07 PM
Looking at that wiki for a minute has me thinking it would be easier to get my Linux+ first then get something from Redhat a little later.

I have a CentOS install on another partition I was using it as a desktop for about a month just to get more familiar with it. Do Linux Admins usually focus on one distro, two, or more. For example should I work on supporting CentOS/Redhat and either Ubuntu or Debian?